Posts Tagged ‘‘The Independent’’

On Friday, Mike also put up a piece commenting on how Jacob Rees-Mogg, the son of William Rees-Mogg, the former Times and Independent journalist, has developed a cult following. Apparently he has his own fan group, dubbed Moggmentum in imitation of Corbyn’s greater and far better supporter’s group. Mike also supports his comments with a couple of Tweets from fans, who rave about how he has ‘class’, is better than ‘left-liberal misfits who would ruin the country’, and how ‘England needs him’.

As Mike then goes on to show, Jacob Rees-Mogg is the kind of right-wing politico Britain really doesn’t need. He is, of course, Eton-educated, and as his voting record shows, he believes in punishing the poor simply for being poor, while also demanding that Tory Toffs like himself get generous state handouts to retain their position of power.

In a long list of the policies favoured by the man dubbed ‘the minister for the 18th century’, Mike shows that

He generally votes against laws to extend equality and human rights.
Consistently votes for cuts to welfare spending.
Consistently votes against gay rights.
General votes against laws to tackle climate change.
Consistently supports the extension of the surveillance state.
Consistently voted against raising support payments for the long term ill or disabled.
Consistently votes against government spending to create jobs for young people, who have been unemployed for some time.
Nearly always votes for restricting the right of EU nationals to remain in Britain.
He was also nearly always in favour of reducing access to legal aid.
He was also a solid supporter of tuition fees, the bedroom tax and against raising unemployment benefit in line with rising prices.

As Simon Renshaw says in his Tweet, which Mike has also posted in his article, Rees-Mogg is not amusing. He is cruel, deplorable and dangerous. And another Tweeter, Paul, also commented

Sperminator Rees-Mogg would not govern for the people, he would rule for his class with a selective dose of his religion thrown in.

This last comment is extremely accurate. Rees-Mogg began his career as a politician by campaigning for the Tories in a depressed fishing area in Fife in Scotland. When asked what he would be campaigning on, Rees-Mogg declared that he would be trying to convince the locals that the country would be best served by retaining an unelected, hereditary House of Lords. Somehow, I’m not surprised he didn’t succeed on this occasion. The Scots aristocracy, led by the Duke of Buccleuch, had a greater degree of political power north of the border than their counterparts further south, until the guid Duke and his ilk were stripped of them by the Labour government in 1975. And obviously, the unkempt masses weren’t keen to bring them back. Given the spectacle of this strange, gangling figure stalking about the streets and vennels and addressing the locals in a cut-class, pukka Etonian accent, I suppose it was almost inevitable that the SNP would suddenly receive a massive boost in support. Heaven knows how he’d have got in Govan or the rougher parts of Glesgae toon.

A few years ago, Private Eye did a little feature on him as part of their series on the new boys and girls, who had entered parliament after that year’s election. Not only does Rees-Mogg expect people to defer to him because of his class, he also expects close family members to protect him personally in uncomfortable situations. By which I mean that once, at Glyndebourne, he got his nanny and his wife to hold a book over his head to protect him from the sun.

The aristocracy are also known for inflicting stupid names on their children. Rees-Mogg is no exception. Along with the normal names he has given his new-born son, Dominic and Christopher, he also inflicted ‘Sextus’ and ‘Dominic’ on the poor little mite. ‘Sextus’ is Latin for ‘Sixth’, and the little chap is his sixth sprog.

So why would anyone become a fan of this weird creature? I think part of it’s because he is so strange, as well as being personally very polite. He has a diffident, gentlemanly manner while at the same time he stands out as something of a character. He’s similar to Boris Johnson in this respect, who’s built his career on a very carefully crafted persona of being a good-natured chump, while he’s anything but in real life. Quietly spoken with a slightly diffident manner, it makes Rees-Mogg look for more harmless and reasonable than he actually is. But as his voting record shows, his political views are those of a typical vengeful Tory thug with all their class hatred and contempt for working people.

Rees-Mogg is a particular presence in my part of the world, because he’s the MP for North-East Somerset, which is just south of my bit of Bristol. I’m not surprised he got in down there. This is the same part of rural Somerset, where the Waldegrave family have their seat. There’s even a pub called ‘The Waldegrave Arms’ in Green Ore, one of the villages there on the Waldegrave estate. This is a part of Britain, where they still feel people should be tugging their forelocks in deference to the lord of the manor.

As for his supporters, from what I’ve heard personally, they’re deeply reactionary, true-blue members of the upper middle class, who really do want to drag us all back to the 19th century, when the upper classes were in power and the proles knew there place – in hovels, suffering from malnutrition and cholera.

There’s some speculation that the Tories are looking to put him into No. 10 at one point. Mike states that he’s not likely to go away, and we shall all do our best to make sure he doesn’t get in. If he does, you can bet that all the poverty, despair, joblessness and starvation the Tories have inflicted on the working class, disabled and poor in this country really will reach truly 19th century levels.

This is another of my cartoons of the Tory party and their lackeys in the media. This time it’s of Iain Duncan Smith, the former head of the Tory party before David Cameron, and head of the DWP in Cameron’s government. I’ve drawn him as a serial killer, lying dead in his bath, surrounded by the skins and corpses of his victims.

It’s based on a joke the American comedian, Bill Hicks, made about Jesse Helms, a member of Reagan’s administration way back in the 1980s. Hicks said that when you had somebody as right-wing as Helms, they had to be hiding a very dark secret. In Meese’s case, it was that he was probably a serial killer. One day they’d find him dead in his bath, after having cut his wrists. On the wall they’d find the words ‘Ah bin a bad boy’ written in his blood.

Then they’d find the skins of all the children he’d murdered up in his attic, with flies going in and out. His mother would at last remark that she’d wondered what the pile of children’s shoes were doing there.

It’s strong stuff, but it is appropriate to apply it to Iain Duncan Smith. He has never killed anyone personally, no matter how toxic his personality is. But under him, the Department of Work and Pensions has been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

I’ve blogged before about the struggle Mike and other disability bloggers and organisations, including the Independent newspaper, had getting the figures for the number of people, who had died after they were thrown off benefits by the DWP. Often this was done for the most trivial of reasons. Seriously ill people, who should never have been called to a fitness to work test in the first place, were told they were ‘fit for work’. They included terminal cancer patients. The numbskulls at Atos also asked amputees when they expected their severed limbs to grow back.

The DWP stalled and prevaricated, doing everything it could not to reveal these figures. They turned down the requests as vexatious, and when this was overturned by the Information Commissioner, they waited until the very last moment before they had to release the information, and then appealed. When they were ordered to release it again, they deliberately misinterpreted the request to give a set of figures slightly different to those requested by Mike. Even so, the figures showed that in the period in question, 13,000-14,000 people had died after having their benefits removed.

Mike and his commenters, like Jeffrey Davies, have called this a genocide of the disabled.

Johnny Void, DPAC – Disabled People Against Cuts, Stilloaks and others have compiled lists of some of the victims, putting names to faces and with brief biographies explaining who they were and why they died. Many died of starvation, while others took their lives in utter despair, wondering how they could ever cope. Their deaths formed the basis for a piece by a socially engaged and enraged artist, and a memorial video I’ve also posed on this blog.

The victims of this callous policy have included an elderly couple, who ended it all with hardly anything to eat in their house; a diabetic soldier; and a young woman in her twenties who leapt to her death with her baby.

And a few days ago Mike posted up news of another victim: Jodie Whiting, a middle-aged mother of nine.

The number of such individual cases recorded by Stilloaks and DPAC has reached somewhere around 500-600 plus.

And the total figures are much, much higher. Oxford University reported that in 2015, austerity killed 30,000 people in this country.

This is 30,000 people, who died in despair and poverty, in one year, in the sixth richest nation on Earth. In a country that has decided it is rich enough to give tax cuts to billionaires.

IDS left office a few years ago, whining about how he was getting the blame for the sanctions system, while it was Tony Blair and New Labour who had invented. Well, they did. But IDS and the Tories didn’t have to retain and expand it.

And IDS and his crew cannot claim ignorance of the immense harm their policies are causing. Oh, they do, of course, but then, Tories are inveterate liars. And the fact that they did not want to release the mortality figures shows exactly that they knew it was killing tens of thousands of people. They just didn’t want the British public to know.

And so its quite appropriate to show IDS as a psychopathic serial killer.

And because they were the architects of austerity, I’ve drawn the flies with David Cameron’s and George Osborne’s faces.

Unfortunately, the carnage hasn’t stopped. Theresa May’s carried on with it, with Damian Green the new head of the DWP.

Jeremy Corbyn has promised to stop it, however. So we must have fresh elections, and get him into No. 10. Before the Tories kill again.

Mike has also reported in one of his posts on the terrible Grenfell Tower fire that the government is trying to cover up the real number of the people, who have and probably will die. The death toll will only include those, who actually died in the fire itself. It will not count the victims who have or will die of their injuries in hospital.

This is another example of Tory mendacity and compulsive secrecy at its worst. I wouldn’t be surprised at any of this. The DWP under Ian Duncan Smith did everything it could not to reveal the true figures for the tens of thousands of people, who died after they were declared fit for work by Atos. Mike and the other disabled rights activists and bloggers had their requests for the information repeatedly denied. They were derided as ‘vexatious’. When the Information Commissioner upheld Mike’s request, IDS and his squalid band refused to release the figures, and then appealed against the decision at the very last minute. And when the Appeals Tribunal finally forced them to comply, they interpreted Mike’s request to send a slightly different set of figures from those he requested.

They even did the same thing to the Independent, when that newspaper made the same request.

This is a government that lies without qualm or compunction, and has absolutely no shame in falsifying the stats for the numbers of people its policies have killed, simply to secure another term in parliament, and to grind more people into poverty for the benefit of the rich.

If the rumours about the D Notice are true, then it shows that the government is terribly afraid that the disclosure of the true mortality figures from the fire will somehow be a threat to the security of the realm. What utter, disgraceful tosh! Perhaps they really do believe their own vile propaganda that the crowds of peaceful protesters, who forced their way into Kensington Council offices this morning, really are some kind of revolutionary mob, determined to overthrow the government. Instead of what they are, angry, bewildered people grieving for the people dear to them, who have been robbed of their homes and property.

The Tories’ determination to cover up the truth using such instruments shows not only their mendacity, but how they really do see themselves and the rich as the British state, which has to be preserved at all costs, even when this involves lying and denying justice and information to the victims of terrible tragedies, tragedies brought on by nearly forty years of Thatcherism in one form or another.

I also have no faith in the promise of a public inquiry. I can remember hearing something cynical about them on Yes, Minister, where Sir Humphrey or somebody remarks that calling one is the best way to cover up government incompetence, as they’ll spend years collecting information and by the time they publish their reports, the public will have lost interest. Perhaps this is what the government hopes will happen to the investigation into this tragedy. Mike has already reported how one Tory minister, Gavin Barwell, now May’s chief of staff, who was supposed to have published a report into the Lakanal House fire four years ago, has not done so. This report would have concluded that tower blocks such as Grenfell Tower were unsafe.

I couldn’t find the clip I wanted of that piece of cynical official wisdom about public inquiries. But I did find this clip from the BBC comedy, in which Sir Humphrey and his boss, Arnold, tell Bernard why open government is wrong and how the British public doesn’t want the truth, and needs and indeed wants to remain stupid and ignorant.

From the actions of the Tory government in trying to suppress the numbers of the people who have and are going to die from this horrific blaze, it seems that May and her minions really do believe this.

They cannot be allowed to get away with this assault on the truth. Not only are they showing that they are an active threat to ordinary people’s lives, they are also a threat to open government and democracy. It is another step on the road to dictatorship that has been set with their establishment of secret courts in which you may be tried in secret, with the evidence against you withheld from yourself and your lawyers and the identity of the accuser also withheld, if the government decides that it is all in the national security.

Now it seems that they regard the figures for people, who have died in tragedies like this a similar threat to ‘national security’.

In this video from The Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his friends show and talk about a video produced by the London School of Economics into the British press’ bias against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the British Labour party. Corbyn, they explain, is the British counterpart of the American progressive, Bernie Sanders, and the British media has been attacking him worse than the American has Bernie.

The LSE video states that the British media sees itself as the watchdogs of democracy. However, corporate ownership has transformed the media into the guard dogs of the political order, and its attack dogs against politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, who threaten it.

In a sample of 25 per cent of the British news about Jeremy Corbyn over 2 months in 8 newspapers, they found that

* 54 per cent of all news articles were negative or antagonistic.
* 67 per cent of all editorials and opinion pieces were negative.

It noted that the right-wing papers were particularly scornful, but there was considerable bias against Corbyn in the left-wing press. The left-wing press denounced him as ‘too left’, ‘unrealistic’ and ‘unelectable’.

Which, as Dore’s own sarcastic comment of, ‘Where have I had that before?’ makes clear, is the same sneers the Democrat party has made against the awesome Bernie.

This was partly due to the civil war in Labour, where anti-Corbyn sources were used in the media to outweigh pro-Corbyn sources.

This is broken down into the stats for the amount of news coming from pro- and anti-Corbyn sources for all newspapers, the Torygraph and the Depress. But anti-Corbyn sources are still used in preference to pro-Corbyn sources in the Daily Mirror and the Independent.

It states that the British media have deliberately set out to delegitimise the leader of the biggest opposition party in the UK.

The screen shows some of the sheer abuse hurled at Corbyn, including ‘vegetarian’. Dore’s fellow comics have great fun with that insult, using it to mock the right-wing rhetoric about ‘pie in the sky’.

It was not only done through scorn and personal attack, but also by associating him with terrorism and the enemies of the UK, such as Osama bin Laden.

* 18 per cent of articles linked him with Iran, Hamas, Hisbollah, the IRA or terrorism in general.

* This was particularly true of articles in the Torygraph, the Depress and the Scum, where the proportion of articles which included these slurs were 14%, 20% and 19% respectively.

* 22 per cent of articles depicted Corbyn or his ideas as dangerous.

* 52 per cent of articles did not give Corbyn’s own views.

* In 11 per cent of articles which did repeat Corbyn’s views, they were taken out of context or distorted.

* The LSE’s video concludes that this is not only a political problem, but also a moral and democratic problem, as the media is used to delegitimise any attack on the status quo, and present neoliberalism as commonsense.

Dore states that this is exactly the same process that has been used against Bernie Sanders and his campaign for single-payer healthcare in the US. And the US media hasn’t told their audience that the reason they can’t have the same healthcare system as the rest of the world is because their government is corrupt.

This video shows what I dare say most of the readers of this blog know already: that the media is massively biased against politicians, who genuinely want to do something for the people.

Like Corbyn.

Like Bernie.

Don’t believe the media lies.

If you haven’t voted for Corbyn already, do so. And save the NHS in England. And if you’re American, support Bernie and his campaign to give America the healthcare system its great people need and deserve. Not the one foisted on it by Trump and the corporate shills in the Republicans and Democrats.

Mike over at Vox Political has put up a piece reporting that Ricky Gervaise, Dr Stephen Hawking and Mark Ruffalo, the actor, who played Dr. Bruce Banner, the alter ego of the Incredible Hulk, have all urged the public to vote Labour on Thursday.

Gervaise issued a Tweet stating he wasn’t telling people which way to vote, but it was a fact that the only way to keep the Tories out was to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

Mark Ruffalo stated that he humbly endorsed Jeremy Corbyn, as he offers people an alternative to the corporate status quo, which never ends well for people. This prompted John Prescott to Tweet ‘Hulk smash Tories’.

Indeed he would. Banner and the Hulk in the original Marvel comics were profoundly countercultural figures. The Hulk was anger incarnate, born in the radiation blast of an American nuclear test when Banner tried to save teenager Rick. And Rick was very much a ‘rebel without a cause’, a youth, who’d driven into the test zone, heedless of his own safety, because he didn’t feel society had anything for him.

While Banner was very much a square, whose girlfriend was the daughter of the commanding officer in charge of the test, the tenor of the strip was very much anti-militarist. The commanding officer hated the Hulk, and had resolved to destroy him. The Hulk, however, really only wanted to be left alone, and so one constant theme was the running battle between the Hulk and the US army. Ang Lee’s film version of the strip, which unfortunately flopped, got this part of the Hulk’s characterisation absolutely right. And in the 1970s, the anti-militarist message of the strip became stronger. In one story, for example, Banner discovered and did his best to oppose dehumanising military experiments to link soldier’s brains to battle robots, experiments that had resulted in the troopers themselves feeling robotic and mechanical.

The influence of the Vietnam War in dehumanising a generation of American young men, to turn them into ruthless monsters responsible for horrific atrocities, is shown very clearly here.

And one real-life physicist, who has also come out for the Labour party is Cosmologist Dr. Stephen Hawking. Hawking told the Independent and the Mirror that he was voting Labour, because another five years of the Tories would be a disaster for the NHS, the police and other public services.

His endorsement has been welcomed by people like Dr. Alex Gates. Hawking is best known for his book, A Brief History of Time, though his background is in Black Holes. Dr Hawking even has a variety of radiation named after him. Black Holes, or rather the Event Horizons around them, are gradually evaporating, and the radiation they give off is called ‘Hawking Radiation’.

And so Dr. Gates quipped that Hawking had spotted the Black Hole in the Tories’ NHS budget.

One space scientist, who I feel would definitely have supported Jeremy Corbyn over here and Bernie Sanders in his own country, is Dr. Carl Sagan. Older readers of this blog may remember Sagan from his TV blockbuster history of science, Cosmos, and his SF novel, Contact, which was turned into a film with Jodie Foster as the astronomer heroine, who travels through a wormhole to make contact with an alien civilisation.

I very definitely don’t share Sagan’s views on religion. He was a religious sceptic and a founding member of CSICOP. But he was also a man of the Left, who hated imperialism and militarism, and supported the burgeoning Green movement. In the 1980s he warned that a nuclear war would result in a devastating global ‘nuclear winter’ of the type created by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

It’s since been shown that this wouldn’t actually occur. But Sagan was right to press for nuclear disarmament, and absolutely right to oppose the new Cold War Reagan and Maggie Thatcher were trying to whip up against the Russians.

He was also critical of the design of the space shuttle. This was supposed to be the vehicle that would open space up to just about everyone, provided you were fit enough to stand the three Gs of acceleration into orbit. The Challenger disaster put an end to that.

Sagan informed the public that the original design for the Shuttle had been for a smaller vehicle, which would have been purely civilian and much safer and more effective. However, the American military had stopped this, because they wanted a larger vehicle to carry their spy satellites. The result was the over-engineered machine, which exploded at least twice, and whose launches had to be cancelled because of engineering problems.

Sagan died of prostate cancer in the 1990s. He was a brilliant scientist and visionary, who speculated about life on Mars and Venus, and, like Hawking, was a staunch advocate of the colonisation of space. And he was inspiration to a generation of young people to have an interest in space and science. One of the most obvious examples of this is Dr Brian Cox, who freely acknowledges Sagan’s influence.

One feels that Sagan would have firmly resisted everything Bush, Blair, and now Trump, Cameron and May have done to destroy the environment and spread carnage around the world through their wars in the Middle East, quite apart from the Trump’s administration hatred of mainstream science.

You don’t have to use Sagan’s ‘spaceship of the imagination’ to travel light years to see the immense harm Theresa May and her party have inflicted on the NHS, the public services and our national security.

And you don’t have to be a great scientist to realise that the Tories’ attacks on education – their spending cuts, privatisation of schools, and burdening students with tens of thousands in debts – will stop the country’s young people fulfilling their academic potential, regardless of the bilge they may spout about encouraging the STEM subjects.

And I think Hawking has spoken out about the dangers of May’s cuts to science funding and research.

More from a contributor to Counterpunch, though this time it isn’t about the lies, smears and bullying of the Israel lobby.

Ken Surin is a British academic, who now lives and teaches in America. He’s written a list of articles attacking Theresa May for her lies, U-turns and her attacks on the poor, working people and the welfare state. And her plans to sell off whatever remains of the NHS to private American healthcare companies as part of a Brexit deal.

He calls her ‘Goody-Two Shoes’, because that’s how May described herself: she says she was a ‘goody-two shoes’ in school.

Her first U-turn affected him personally. He lost his right to vote in 2002 when Blair decided that Brits who had been away for more than 15 years shouldn’t have the right to vote in British elections. May then declared that if she got in, she’d repeal it. Now that she’s in power, she hasn’t. She’s a liar. But then, what do you expect from the Tories?

He also states that he’s not surprised the Tories have got a 17 point lead over Labour. They’ve been undermined by the antics of the Blairites, the Zionist lobby’s maligning him as a anti-Semite, because he’s a member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the loss of northern working class voters to UKIP, and, most significantly, the massive right-wing bias of the media.

A study by the LSE showed that on average, only 11 per cent of newspaper articles accurately reflected Labour policies. And in the case of the Daily Heil and Express, that ratio falls to zero.

He states that May is simply an opportunist, as shown by the way she voted Remain in the Brexit referendum, but to stay in power has turned her party into ‘UKIP-lite’.

And then he gives the following list of some her lies and U-turns.

The Tories were fined £70,000 last month by the Electoral Commission for failing to declare more than £275,000 in election-spending in the 2015 election. A dozen police forces have passed files relating to these expenses to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The CPS had intended to decide by the end of May if there were to be prosecutions for these violations, but an election in 2017 would probably take the wind out of attempts to prosecute 20 Tory MPs (or thereabouts) for their fraudulent activity in the 2015 election– “that’s history now”, many are likely to say.

If May called an early election for this reason, it would only demonstrate the flexibility of her principles.

May’s most recent budget dissolved into chaos when an increase in national insurance for the self-employed broke a 2015 election manifesto pledge. The ensuing public outcry panicked May and her colleagues into a U-turn, and the proposed increase was rescinded.

Since 2010 the Tories have promised to increase spending on the National Health Service every year, and that funding for schools would increase per student. In its report card after the most recent budget, The Independent said:

The public sector has been another loser. The NHS, which was in the black in 2010, faced a £1.85 billion deficit in 2016, the largest deficit in its history. As a result, waiting times are up, and the NHS is facing, what the British Red Cross have described as a ‘humanitarian crisis.’ Conditions in the NHS have led to an exodus of doctors. A third of Accident and Emergency doctors left the UK to work abroad between 2010 and 2015. There is a similar pattern in education, where 10,000 teachers left the profession in Cameron’s first term. In both sectors, real terms cuts in spending has increased workloads to a point where many professionals are no longer willing to continue.

Running down public services has hit some groups much harder than others. Austerity has hit women’s incomes twice as hard as men’s. Cuts to lone parent benefits since 2010, for example, have fallen disproportionality on women, for the simple reason that women make up 90 per cent of lone parents. At the same time, as women tend to be low earners they have benefited far less from tax cuts than men.

This is followed by a list of motions she has voted for, in which she has consistently supported the rich, and attacked the poor.

As home secretary, May introduced laws forcing internet service providers to help the UK’s spy agencies hack into computers.

Despite moving her party to the right so it can campaign as UKIP lite, May’s record on immigration when she was home secretary prior to becoming prime minister would certainly not please UKIP voters. May vowed to cut net immigration down to the “tens of thousands”, only to have it increase to a record high of 330,000.

May voted for the notorious “bedroom tax”, which reduced housing benefit for social-housing tenants deemed to have unoccupied bedrooms.

She voted against raising welfare benefits so they remained in line with inflation.

She voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work because of illness or disability.

She voted for making local councils reduce the amount spent on helping those in financial need pay their council taxes.

She voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits.

She voted against smoking bans and the hunting ban.

She voted for increasing the rate of the highly regressive Value Added Tax (VAT)

She voted against increasing the tax rate applied to income over £150,000.

She voted against a banker’s bonus tax.

While she voted for the bedroom tax to be imposed on people in social housing, May voted against the mansion tax, i.e. the annual tax on the value of expensive homes.

She voted for more restrictions on trade union activity.

May voted against restricting the provision of services to private patients by the NHS.

She voted for raising England’s undergraduate tuition fees to £9,000 per year.

She has always voted for academy (i.e. private) schools.

While all the above has been transpiring, a massive upwards transfer of wealth from lower-tiered income earners to the top has been occurring. According to the Social Market Foundation, in the UK:

… the average wealth of the best-off one-fifth of families rose by 64 per cent between 2005 and 2012-13.

However, the SMF found the poorest 20 per cent are less financially secure than they were in 2005, with their net wealth falling by 57 per cent and levels of debt and use of overdrafts increasing. Homeowners have raced ahead of people in rented accommodation….

The Equality Trust, citing 2014 data from the Office for National Statistics, said the majority of the UK population (66%) hold no positive financial assets at all, while the remaining 34% hold £9trillion in such assets.

He also cites a report that May wishes to sell off the NHS by the Independent.

The Independent has just reported that May, who is desperate for trade deals to replace those made under the auspices of the EU, which will of course no longer exist after Brexit, is willing, as part of a deal with Trump, to sell-off the NHS to those most villainous of business enterprises, the American “healthcare” corporations.

Surin states that ‘this is class war by another name’, a sentiment expressed by Owen Jones in his book Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class.

Surin says about May herself

Going solely by the immense distance between what she professes in public and how she votes, Theresa May is an absolutely bare-faced phony. Her voting record, displayed above, confirms her fundamental and vital support for Tory austerity policy.

Don’t be deceived by the media and the Tories. May will kill off the welfare state and the NHS, just as Margaret Thatcher wanted and the Tories and Blairites have been conspiring to do over the past forty years.

Last week I put up a post expressing my extreme scepticism about Tim Farron’s claim that his party will offer ‘strong opposition’ to the Tories. They didn’t when the Tories won the 2010 election. In fact, they went into coalition with them almost immediately. They spun stories about how they had tried to make a pact with Labour previously, but this had fallen through. In fact, this was shown to be lies. They Lib Dems had already decided two months previously that they would join the Tories. And despite claiming in opposition that they would oppose tuition fees, the Lib Dems under Clegg then betrayed millions of university students by raising them, even though the Tories were prepared to concede keeping tuition fees lower to them.

Now it seems they’re getting ready to do the same again. Farron has claimed he won’t go into coalition with either Labour or the Tories. But Mike put up a post on Saturday showing that while Farron is sincere about not wanting to join a coalition with Labour, despite his promises he seems ready to join the Tories in government again. The Independent reported he was refusing to rule out any coalition deal with them. As for Brexit, Farron has changed his rhetoric from ‘opposing Brexit’ to ‘opposing a hard Brexit’. Which suggests that he has profoundly altered his party’s pro-EU stance there, ready to join the Tories in coalition.

Also worth reading are the comments to this post. One of Mike’s many excellent commenters, Casalealex, wrote:

In 2002, a secret Liberal Democrat document came to light – produced by the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors – in which local activists were urged to “be wicked, act shamelessly, stir endlessly” in order to win elections.

In fact, ask anyone who’s been involved in local politics and they’ll tell you Liberal Democrat activists are the most infamous for playing dirty, using underhand methods and being utterly ruthless.

Exactly as they turned out to be nationally in their coalition with the Tories.

I’ve heard Tories complain and describe the underhanded tactics employed by the Lib Dems, and how they fight dirtier – in their opinion – than the other parties, so Casalealex’s words ring true. And as their actions in the government before last has shown, they couldn’t be trusted then, and they can’t be trusted now.

Kenneth Surin, one of the contributors to Counterpunch, has written a piece giving his analysis of the obstacles facing Jeremy Corbyn in his battle with the right-wing media, the Blairites, and the Tories. He points out that the tabloids, with the exception of the Mirror, are solidly right-wing, or owned by the very rich, who will naturally be biased towards the Tories. The Groaniad is centre, or centre-left, but its hacks are largely Blairites, who will attack Corbyn. He suggests that some of this vilification comes from the fact that Corbyn is not a ‘media-age’ politicians, but speaks as ordinary people do, rather than in soundbites. He makes the point that the Tories have copied Blair in trying to promote a Thatcherism without Thatcher’s scowls and sneers, and so Labour has no chance electorally if it decides to promote the capitalist status quo. He notes that Labour lost Scotland to the SNP, partly because the SNP placed itself as rather more Social Democratic than Labour. As for Labour ‘rust-belt’ heartlands in the Midlands and North of England, he thinks their dejected electorates now find UKIP and its White nationalism more palatable. He also states that the less educated working class, abandoned by Labour’s careerist politicians, also find UKIP more acceptable.

He suggests that if Labour wants to win, it should have the courage to abandon Thatcherism, and also attack the millionaires that invaded the party during Blair’s and Miliband’s periods as leader. These, like the Cameron’s Chipping Norton set, are obscenely rich when 8 million people in this country live in ‘food-insecure households’. And he goes into detail describing just what luxurious they’re eating and drinking too, far beyond anyone else’s ability to afford. Artisanal gin, anyone?

He also recommends that Labour should embrace Brexit, as this would allow the country to get rid of the massive hold a corrupt financial sector has on the country.

I agree with many of his points, but profoundly disagree on others. Promoting Brexit won’t break the dead hand of the financial sector over this country. Quite the opposite. It’s being promoted by the financial sector because it will allow them to consolidate their stranglehold on the British economy by making the country an offshore tax haven for plutocratic crims.

I also think he overestimates the electoral strength of UKIP. Since Brexit, they’ve been on their way down and out. Many of the people, who’ve voted Leave have since been aghast that they won. They only wanted to give the establishment a nasty shock. They did not really want to leave Europe. Also, UKIP at heart was a single-issue party. Alan Sked founded them to oppose European federalism. Now that the Leave campaign succeeded – sort of – they’re struggling to get votes, and have been going through leaders as though it was going out of fashion. They have tried to pick up votes through some very unpleasant racist and Islamophobic policies and statements by their leading members. This has contributed to a disgusting rise in racist incidents. However, UKIP’s electoral base tend to be those aged 50 and over. The younger generations are much less racist and prejudiced against gays. Please note: I realise that this is a generalisation, and that you can find racist youngsters, and anti-racist senior citizens. Indeed, it was the older generation that did much to change attitudes to race and sexuality in this country. So the demographics are against UKIP. Racism and White nationalism also won’t save them from defeat, at least, I hope. The blatantly racist parties – the BNP, NF, British Movement and the rest of the scum – failed to attract anything like the number of votes or members to be anything other than fringe parties, often with trivial numbers of members. One of the contributors to Lobster, who did his doctorate on the British Far Right after the 1979 election, suggested that the NF only had about 2000 members, of whom only 200 were permanent. Most of the people, who joined them were only interested in cracking down on immigration, not in the intricacies of Fascist ideology. Also, many right-wingers, who would otherwise have supported them, were put off by their violence and thuggery. One of the Tories, who briefly flirted with them in the early ’70s quickly returned to the Tory party, appalled at their violence. Since then, the numbers of people in the extreme right have continued to decline. As for UKIP, even in their heyday, their strength was greatly – and probably deliberately – exaggerated. Mike and others have shown that at the time the Beeb and the rest of the media were falling over themselves to go on about how wonderful UKIP were, they were actually polling less than the Greens.

But I agree with Surin totally when it comes to throwing out once and for all Thatcherism and its vile legacy of poverty and humiliation. He’s right about the bias of the media, and the massive self-indulgence of the Chipping Norton set.

Surin writes

The context for analyzing this election must first acknowledge that the UK’s media is overwhelmingly rightwing.

Only one tabloid, The Daily Mirror, avoids hewing to rightwingery.

Of the others, The Sun is owned by the foreigner Rupert Murdoch, known in the UK for good reasons as the “Dirty Digger”.

The Nazi-supporting and tax-dodging Rothermere family have long owned The Daily Mail.

Richard “Dirty Des” Desmond (the former head of a soft porn empire) owns The Daily Express.

A Russian oligarch owns The Evening Standard.

Of the so-called “quality” newspapers, only The Guardian is remotely centrist or centre-left.

All the other “quality” papers are owned by the right-wingers or those on the centre-right.

Murdoch owns The Times, basically gifted to him by Thatcher, who bypassed the usual regulatory process regarding media monopolies to bestow this gift. The Times, which used to be known in bygone days as “The Old Thunderer”, is now just a slightly upmarket tabloid.

The tax-dodging Barclay brothers own The Daily Telegraph.

Another Russian oligarch owns The Independent.

The BBC, terrified by the not so subtle Tory threats to sell it off to Murdoch, and undermined editorially by these threats, is now basically a mouthpiece of the Tories.

This situation has, in the main, existed for a long time.

The last left-wing leader of the Labour party, Michael Foot, was ruthlessly pilloried by the right-wing media in the early 1980s for all sorts of reasons (including the somewhat less formal, but very presentable, jacket he wore at the Cenotaph ceremony on Remembrance Sunday).

Every Labour leader since then, with exception of Tony Blair, has been undermined by the UK’s media. Blair’s predecessor, Neil Kinnock, was derided endlessly by the media (“the Welsh windbag”, etc), even though he took Labour towards the right and effectively prepared the ground for Blair and Brown’s neoliberal “New Labour”.

***Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, has been vilified ever since he was elected as party leader by a percentage higher than that achieved by Blair when he was elected leader (59.5% versus Blair’s 57% in 1994).

The disparagement and backbiting of Corbyn has, alas, come from the Blairite remnant in his party as much as it has come from the Conservatives and their megaphones in the media.

But while this is to be expected, a powerful source of anti-Corbyn vituperation has been The Guardian, supposedly the most liberal UK newspaper. Its journalists– most notably Polly Toynbee, Jonathan Freedland, Suzanne Moore, Anne Perkins, and Owen Jones– have done as much as Murdoch to undermine Corbyn.

To some extent this viciousness on the part of the Blairite faction, and its media acolytes, is understandable. Corbyn, who voted against the war in Iraq, believes Blair should be in the dock of the international court at The Hague for war crimes. The Conservatives, always a war-loving party, want no such thing for Blair, even though he defeated them in 3 general elections. Blair however is a closet Conservative.
***Labour needs to go on the attack, on two fronts especially.

The first is Thatcher’s baleful legacy, entrenched by her successors, which has been minimal economic growth, widespread wage stagnation, widening inequality as income has been transferred upwards from lower-tiered earners, mounting household debt, and the extensive deindustrialization of formerly prosperous areas.

At the same time, the wealthy have prospered mightily. Contrast the above-mentioned aspect of Thatcher’s legacy with the world of Dodgy Dave Cameron’s “Chipping Norton” social set, as described by Michael Ashcroft (a former Cameron adviser who fell out with Dodgy Dave) in his hatchet-job biography of Cameron. The following is quoted in Ian Jack’s review of Call Me Dave: “Theirs is a world of helicopters, domestic staff, summers in St Tropez and fine food from Daylesford, the organic farm shop owned by Lady Carole Bamford”.

The Tories and their supporters are partying away as a class war is being waged, and Labour has been too timid in bringing this contrast to the attention of the electorate: the Chipping Norton set feasts on Lady Carole’s organic smoked venison and artisanal gin (available to the online shopper at https://daylesford.com/), while UN data (in 2014) indicates that more than 8 million British people live in food-insecure households.

“New” Labour did have a credibility problem when it came to doing this– Ed Miliband had at least 7 millionaires in his shadow cabinet, and another 13 in his group of advisers. So, a fair number of Labour supporters are likely to be connoisseurs of Lady Carole’s luxury food items in addition to the usual bunch of Tory toffs.

The austere Corbyn (he is a vegetarian and prefers his bicycle and public transport to limousines) is less enamoured of the high life, in which case the credibility problem might not be such a big issue.

Organic, artisanal food, holidays in St. Tropez, helicopters, smoked venison – all this consumed at the same time as Dave and his chums were claiming that ‘we’re all in it together’. We weren’t. We never were.

And remember – many members of the media, including people like Jeremy Clarkson, were part of the Chipping Norton set. And some of the BBC presenters are paid very well indeed. Like John Humphries, who tweeted about how he was afraid Labour was ‘going to punish the rich.’

As he is benefitting from a massive shift in the tax burden from the rich to the poor, it’s fair to say that he, and the wealthy class of which he is a part, are literally feasting at the poor’s expense. Furthermore, the affluent middle and upper classes actually use more of the state’s resources than the poor. So Labour would not be ‘punishing the rich’ if they increased their share of the tax burden. They’d only be requiring them to pay their whack.

A few days ago I put up a piece about Richard Seymour’s book Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (London: Verso 2016). Seymour’s analysis of the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, and what it means for the Labour party, is very much his own. Seymour points out that one of the reasons why Corbyn was able to take the Labour leadership was because the right-wing Labour vote was divided between three opposing candidates. He sees the Labour party as never having really been a Socialist party, and that Corbyn’s election as leader was part of a process of political stagnation and degeneration both within the Labour party and generally in British politics.

However, in the introduction and first chapter, he does attack the ‘Project Fear’ campaign launched by the Blairites and the press against Corbyn, and refutes the smears against him – that he and his voters were unelectable and anti-Semitic. The Blairites and their toadies in the press also tried smearing Corbyn and his supporters as misogynists, just as Killary had smeared Sanders and his supporters in the US in her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. And just as Killary’s smears against Sanders were lies, so were the accusations against Corbyn and his supporters. Seymour writes

One of the main methods of obloquy from the centre-left papers – aside from the claim that Corbyn’s supporters were either spaniel-eyed naifs, gently prancing around in cloud cuckoo land, or dangerous ideological zealots – was to bait Corbyn’s supporters as sexist. The Guardian had backed Yvette Cooper for the leadership, partially on the grounds that she would be the first female leader, bringing ‘down-to-earth feminism’ to the role, and challenging austerity policies that hurt women. Its leading columnist and former Social Democratic Party (SDP) star Polly Toynbee seconded the endorsement, announcing: ‘Labour needs a woman leader.’ This prompted a reply by the seasoned feminists Selma James and Nina Lopez, who pointed out that Cooper not only supported ‘sexist austerity’ but had also implemented it in government, abolishing income support and extending work-capability assessments for the sick and disabled. Nonetheless, having supported Cooper as a ‘feminist’, it didn’t require much imagination to notice that Corbyn was not female and thus to indict his supporters ‘brocialists’. Suzanne Moore complained that as Corbyn was ‘anointed leader’ – that is to say, elected leader – ‘not one female voice was heard’. The remarkable thing about this complaint was that Corbyn won among women by a landslide. The polls showed that 61 per cent of women eligible to vote in the election supported Corbyn, while the two female candidates, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper, gained 4 per cent and 19 per cent respectively. The polling company YouGov pointed out that ‘women who are eligible to vote are dramatically more likely to vote Corbyn than men’. What Moore meant was the she hadn’t listened to the women who supported Corbyn, an important distinction.

This campaign spread to the Independent,which published a surreal piece headlined, ‘If it’s truly progressive, Labour will have voted in a female leader – regardless of her policies’. It was also mirrored by the Telegraph, which gleefully wondered if Corbyn had a ‘women problem’. Cathy Newman, a Channel 4 News reporter who had recently made headlines by falsely reporting an example of sexist exclusion at a mosque, authored a piece for the Telegraph which sneered ‘Welcome to Jeremy Corbyn’s blokey Britain – where “brocialism” rules’. Newman’s complaint did not concern policy, on which Corbyn was difficult to attack, but representation. She alleged that none of the ‘top jobs’ went to women. Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, it must be said, was notable for being the first to have more than 50 per cent of its posts occupied by women – as opposed to the pathetic 22 per cent representation that women have in wider public life. The shadow ministries of Defence, Business, Health and Education were all run by women. The shadow cabinet was, in other words, more gender-egalitarian on this front than any previous Labour shadow cabinet. It is perfectly fair comment to lament that important posts such as shadow chancellor have never been held by a woman, but the force of the point is blunted if it is simply used in an opportunistic way to belabour Corbyn. Likewise, the New Statesman’s effort to pour cold water on Corbyn’s victory, with the headline ‘Labour chooses white man as leader’, would have been more convincing if the publication had not generously supported every previous white man elected as Labour leader.

(Pp.37-9).

From this it’s very clear that the accusation of sexism and misogyny against Corbyn were merely another opportunistic smear by a group of entitled, wealthy Blairites. It was monumentally hypocritical, as these women were perfectly happy with promoting policies that actively harmed – and under the Tories, are still harming women. The ladies, who supported Corbyn knew better, and voted for substance, rather than the specious feminism of a female candidate, who was only interested in promoting herself and not improving conditions for women as a whole.

In this video from the Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his team comment on media censorship and lies about the war in Syria. They start off by playing a clip of Wesley Clarke talking about how a general he was interviewing told him, and handed him a paper, showing that America was going to invade seven countries including Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria and Iran. The general did not know why these countries were targeted for invasion, and there was no new evidence against them which would justify invasion.

Dore also makes the point that Obama, despite all his rhetoric about ‘hope’ and ‘change’, has expanded the number of wars being fought by America from two to eight. If this had occurred under Trump, the public would be horrified, by as it has been done under supposedly liberal Barack Obama, it’s been apparently acceptable.

Dore also describes how Google, which owns YouTube, are attempting to stifle independent comment and reporting on the war on Syria by demonetising videos that are critical of American support for the rebels. This has been done not just to Dore, but also to another poster.

He then shows another video of a rare instance where a reporter in the mainstream media has criticised the official reporting of the civil war. The presenter, Ken or Ben Swan shows scenes of a crowd in east Aleppo celebrating that part of the city’s liberation by Assad and the Russians from the rebel groups supported by America. He makes the point that if Assad is as bitterly hated by his own people, as the media claims, then why should they be celebrating his victory?

Swan goes further and demolishes the notion of ‘moderate’ rebels, who America and the West are supposedly helping to defeat Assad. In fact, these moderate rebels don’t exist. The Free Syrian Army was disbanded last year. They gave their weapons, which had been supplied by America, to the Al-Nusra Front, which is the name for the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. And the biggest force now fighting Assad is ISIS. But the mainstream media simply refers to them as ‘rebels’. It does not tell the American public that their government is supporting ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Swann also shows footage of the buses that were sent into eastern Aleppo by Assad to evacuate the civilians there. These were attacked and set on fire by the rebels. It was done deliberately to prevent the civilians from leaving, as the rebels hide behind them.

Dore makes the point that you will not hear any mention of the above on any of the mainstream channels, such as CNN, MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and so on, and jokes about Swan himself being assassinated.

Here’s the video, which contains strong language.

Although Dore is commenting from an American perspective, the same is very much true of British journalism on Syria, with some exceptions. The I did report the attacks on the buses sent into evacuate the civilians in eastern Aleppo. However, we have had various Tory MPs jumping up and down demanding that we send planes in to bomb Assad and support the non-existent ‘moderate’ terrorists, who are going to liberate Syria for Islamism. With the exception of the I, and possibly the Independent, I don’t recall anyone making the point that ISIS is now the largest opposition group, and that if we send troops into the country, we will joining forces with them.

The media are deliberately feeding the American and British peoples lies to promote a war that has absolutely nothing to do with spreading democracy.